Google Engineers to NSA: "Fuck these guys"

Just because large, important chunks of Silicon Valley will play ball with American spies, doesn't mean all the underlings are game. Two security engineers at the company that runs your email inbox are speaking out, and they are using bad words.

Cooperating with court-mandated data requests is one thing. But having the NSA siphon data out of Google's servers without their knowledge is another—or maybe it's karma. But Google's Brandon Downey is pissed:

Fuck these guys. I've spent the last ten years of my life trying to keep Google's users safe and secure from the many diverse threats Google faces...The US has to be better than this; but I guess in the interim, that security job is looking a lot more like a Sisyphus thing than ever.

A colleague joined in:

I now join him in issuing a giant Fuck You to the people who made these slides. I am not American, I am a Brit, but it's no different - GCHQ turns out to be even worse than the NSA.We designed this system to keep criminals out. There's no ambiguity here. The warrant system with skeptical judges, paths for appeal, and rules of evidence was built from centuries of hard won experience. When it works, it represents as good a balance as we've got between the need to restrain the state and the need to keep crime in check. Bypassing that system is illegal for a good reason.

This is, of course, a battle of words between amazingly skilled nerds who exploit our privacy to make a profit for Google, versus amazingly skilled nerds who exploit our privacy for what's called national security. Take your pick!